Dec 01, 2017

For Love of the Bike

WRITTEN BY

Now a professional cyclist, Kelly reflects on the moments that got him here.

I always wanted to fit in. One of my first memories as a child was being overly agreeable to try and please other kids just so I could be included in their friendship circle. I’m not exactly sure where it came from, but that character trait was present in me for a large part of my life far before I realized I love bikes.

I would say the most telling (and traumatic) moments of that trait for me were in junior high and high school when the dreaded call to sign up for sports arrived. ‘Sport’ was seemingly the most important measuring stick of worth in a small town like the one where I grew up. At least that’s how I felt as a young man.

Situated next to the Badlands of North Dakota, Dickinson was a football and wrestling town. My build and athletic ability (or lack thereof), didn’t allow me to even think about trying out for football – and I was definitely not cut out for wrestling. I did find a small group of like-minded allies who were into skateboarding, which became my de facto ‘sport’.

There I could find acceptance and freedom to try and be myself. I loved every aspect of skateboarding even though I knew I would never be good at it. However, the community aspect was really what kept me around that circle until I graduated from high school. Just two days after I walked across the stage in our school’s gymnasium to grab that coveted diploma, I packed my bags and left for Colorado.

Kelly racing at MTB90 in Brazil. Despite not even running on his own bike he took third place. Image: MTB90

Being naive has its benefits. When I rolled into Denver at the age of 18, I was wide eyed and ready to take everything in. I hadn’t run away from my home town as much as I had chosen to try a new adventure in life. In fact, I’ve always been very close with my family and it was a difficult decision to leave them in search of a new and unknown chapter in my life.

The first order of business was to get a job. It turns out that graduation money only goes so far when you have to get your first apartment in a big city. I look back on those days with bewilderment that I actually didn’t even think about a financial plan. I just sort of assumed it would work out. And it did.

Soon after getting into town, I got a job at a coffee shop where a tight-knit group of cyclists would meet up post-ride and hash out the gritty details of how much they had just suffered, all the while laughing about it. Some of them were bike shop employees, some were just serious cyclists, and some were Olympians. I quickly befriended them – or more accurately – they befriended me.

I was a completely unknown kid who was working as a barista and had no athletic ability, but they were treating me like a part of their group. I had expressed interest in learning how to mountain bike after I had seen my first full-suspension bike and I was quickly set up with the gear and the people to teach me how. It was love at first pedal stroke. That was 1998.

Kelly racing at Maah Daah Hey. Image by Chad Ziemendorf.

Just yesterday, I was mountain biking outside of Golden, CO and couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic about the good ol’ days, shortly after I moved here, when I was on the same trail with a friend of mine. She was an Olympic cyclist from Australia and she took me under her wing. There was no ego, no pretension, no feeling of “I’m wasting this woman’s time.” She and I had great conversations which led to a solid friendship. What I remember most was how professional she was, but also how ‘in the moment’ she was.

That always stuck with me. She guided me along until I ultimately grew into a bike racer, sharing with me what hard work and discipline looked like and what the outcome would be.

If I take a 30,000-foot view of how I became a ‘professional’ cyclist, I’m completely blown away at how lucky I was to fall into such a great group of people. There was never a need to try and fit in. We all love bikes and shared a potent love for being outside on two wheels. Sure, some of us loved pushing ourselves harder than others, but that was something each of us respected about one another.

One person in particular, Josh, became one of my closest friends and teammates. Of all the hours we spend training together, our conversations rarely revolve around racing. We cover everything from family, kids, work, food, movies, beer and travel. Some of the most formative years of my life happened to be in the midst of my growing love of the bike, so most of my major life-changing events have specific rides and people attached to them. Those moments, those rides, are invaluable to me and I’m so grateful for them.

Kelly and his twins after winning Maah Daah Hey 100 for the third time in a row. Image by Rachel Sturtz

Ultimately, I realized that I race bikes so I can use it as an excuse to ride. I rarely record any data from my training rides and the most technologically advanced piece of gear I wear is a watch with a second hand (and yes, I deservedly get ridiculed by other athletes). This is not to say that I don’t work hard nor take my ‘second job’ seriously. I’ve always prided myself on being professional when I realized I had an opportunity to excel in a sport, but I was taught by my peers that winning and losing is fleeting.

My coach told me to realize the ‘now’, because soon enough it will be the ‘back then’. Bike racing will be done one day so I certainly make sure to enjoy it, but I also know the longevity of the sport lies in my love of being on a trail, high up in the mountains. No number plate needed there.

As with any relationship, sometimes it takes a while to find one another. I was into my 20s before I really started to understand how important cycling was to me and it became a sort of therapy. If I ever needed to get away, the trails were always going to be there. The mountains were always welcoming and the air was ever inviting. Cycling has given me a calmness that I believe I was longing for from a young age and I will forever be grateful to the people who went out of their way to take me in.

This is an advertisement for OutdoorVoyage.com

Featured Image by Chad Ziemendorf

Continue Reading

Oct 01, 2018

The Forbidden Zone: Mongols, to Your Horses

The rolling green hills, rocky passes, flower-laden meadows and clear streams of Gorkhi Terelj National Park in northern Mongolia is the birthplace of the Mongols. The Outdoor Journal spent a week on horseback with Stone Horse Expeditions in the heart of this country’s vast wilderness.

WRITTEN BY

Tdrihe Khan Khentii mountains stretched before us, from one end of the azure sky to the other. Tegri, the Great Sky God, watched us with his infinite panorama. From here, I could see miles and miles into the distance. This was the “Forbidden Zone”, that unknown wilderness where Genghis Khan was born. As a child and then again much later on, he hunted here, his true home, on a horse, sheltered in a ger or under the blue sky. When he was a boy, exiled with his family into the cold and harsh wilderness of the northern Mongolian hills, his only friends were what these lands contained. After he built an empire and died, it became a sacred and taboo zone, left to the deer and wolves. For decades the area had been closed off. The Soviets enforced it as a Highly Restricted Area to allow them to do what they wished with it – from logging and military exercises, to also countering any potential rise of Mongolian nationalism around the great Khan. Despite those years, the Area remained wild.

No wonder the Mongols worshipped it.

A day before, we had crossed fresh bear tracks. There were no signs of human presence apart from our train of horses and riders. And now, this vista lay in front of us, green and yellow grassy hills, long valleys, meadows of flowers stretching to higher mountains all the way to Siberia, some still snow-dusted despite the summer sun. Burkhan Khaldun stood further behind higher peaks. And that incredible sky. No wonder the Mongols worshipped it. We all lived once under this blue infinity. As we’d ridden northwards away from Ulan Bator, the city’s pollution had faded away long ago, the gray curse had lifted and my eyes had once again accustomed themselves to what they had evolved to do – see long distances, look for hares, deer, bears, navigate passes and ford streams, climb rocks, and watch falcons circle on thermals above. And over the last few days, we had done all these things.

The weary horseriders arrive in the ger to refresh themselves.

We had left our last camp around mid-morning, some hours ago. One half of the party broke away to ride into another valley out west, while Keith and I wanted to ride up and to the pass in the range of hills that separated the Gorkhi Terelj from the Khan Khentii. We skirted the granite mounds which punctuated the ends of this valley, forded a marshy grassland below the campsite, fought off the bloodsucking horseflies that made our horses’ lives miserable for a little while, eventually entering a tall forest of larch and birch. The ground began to rise as we entered a narrow rocky trail that started to wind uphill. Jerry, my sturdy, stubborn little Mongolian horse plodded on. This easy gait was infinitely more comfortable than the long trots of our previous days in the saddle. Keith Swenson, a taciturn, the 64 year-old owner of Stone Horse Expeditions along with his wife Sabine Schmidt, showed none of the wear I felt – my skin of my thighs were quite literally raw after 50 kilometers of riding and trotting in the wilderness. After a few days Keith opened up with wisecracks. “People ask what do you do, and I say I’m a rider”, says Keith, punning on his American accent. “They think I mean ‘writer’, “and they ask, what have you written?” “So I say, Blackie, Brownie, Ol Dirty Face…”, naming his horses.

These lands, however remote, are important.

Halfway up the trail was a shaman’s totem, poles placed on the ground to make a conical structure, wrapped with bits of fabric and ribbons. But at the base, and near a tree, we also found broken shards of glass, vodka bottles drunk and thrown by unknown travelers who no longer respected their old ways. We’d been riding for an hour or so and we stopped for a short break in the little opening in the forest. It was quite warm in the strong sun, perhaps 30C like every day of the summer, but cold at nights, often dipping below freezing.

These Mongolian horses play a huge role in making a trip across the steppe easy and fun for riders. Each horse has a unique personality. Big Dirty Face pictured here loves coffee and will drink it straight from your cup if you let him.

The Mongols invented the modern world*

The old ways are important. These lands, however remote, are important. The Mongols invented the modern world*. When, at the age of 55, Genghis Khan rode out into Asia and Europe, he created the largest empire known to humanity, as well as its first international postal system, and the largest free-flowing network of ideas, trade and culture. But today, Mongolia feels relatively isolated and far away, landlocked in the Eurasian continent. And getting there turned out to be a greater adventure than we’d expected. Instead of flying, we took the famous Trans-Mongolian from Beijing to Ulan Bator. At 11pm, the train pulled into the last station on the China-Mongolia border to change the undercarriage (the railway gauge is different in Mongolia). Three hours later we got back on the train and waited patiently for the Chinese guards to hand us all our passports back. Our intern’s passport was returned ripped from its cover. Before anyone could make a move, the train entered Mongolia… where the Mongolian border guard insisted that the 18-year old girl get off the train because she wasn’t allowed to enter on an invalid passport. Twenty minutes of arguing later, at nearly three am, we got off and watched the train leave without us.

Fifteen hours later, after many phone calls and emails to various embassies and important officials, she was finally allowed to enter the country. The Trans-Mongolian having long gone, we finagled an eight-hour taxi ride across the great steppes (on a second-hand car coming off a goods train) for $45. Welcome to Mongolia.

REAL MEN TROT

I did not have much riding experience, but I usually don’t let a little thing like that deter me from a trip. Keith, once also a climber, agreed that anyone up for adventure would be perfectly fine on a Mongolian horse. They were sturdy and forgiving. We all gathered at their staging camp an hour’s drive from Ulan Bator – a Singaporean couple on their second trip with Stone Horse, their friend from Hong Kong, a French diplomat from Swaziland, our team of three, Keith, Sabine and their crew – Nyamaa, Buyana and Jackson, the American intern. Soon, our team of 16 horses and Stinky the Mongolian Dog, a most genuine companion if there ever was one, were off towards the north. Day one went reasonably well, with a short four hour ride to our first campsite inside the Gorkhi Terelj National Park. The other experienced riders asked me various questions about how I felt and whether my horse had cantered or galloped, and I said I didn’t know, but the horse seemed to know what it was doing. Apparently, they have many gaits.

The morning begins easily and we move along a gentle valley. At a stream, the horses bend to drink. They’re herd animals, comfortable only in their own numbers. Suddenly, there’s a commotion as one of the pack horses spooks and bolts. We’re unprepared, and good old Jerry decides to follow the bolting horse too, suddenly turning 180 degrees and galloping wildly. I have to pull firmly on the reins to stop him, while the teamsters have to get the other fella back. He’s bucking around wildly, his unshod feet stamping, his grass-eating brain telling him that that bee sting he felt on his hind was a wolf’s nip. Stinky ignores the commotion, running ahead happily back in his favorite hunting grounds, chasing ground squirrels to their holes. We continue, entering a forest and then riding uphill to a pass. On the other side, a wide open valley, and our first real gallop. Now I feel the sensation, riding with the animal as one, gently cycling my feet in the stirrups and gripping with my knees, all of it coming naturally to me and I urge Jerry on, on, on. Chhoo, Jerry, Chhoo! We stop at a babbling brook in the valley below where we wash our faces. Are we in paradise?

And then the long trot begins. For a horse, it’s the most comfortable way to move. But it’s bouncy. I try to “post” like all the real riders. Watching me grimace in agony, Keith smiled and said, “real men trot,” as he rode along comfortably with that rolling ankle movement to compensate for the horse’s bumpy ride. “Trotting is how the Mongols moved such vast distances. If you make him gallop, you won’t get very far, you’ll kill the horse”.

Sabine crosses a river along with Stinky, the resident guard dog, who followed the horses and was very much a part of the team.

Mongolians worship the sky and we understood why after witnessing the big blue skies and red sunsets of the steppe.

Though every Mongolian doesn’t ride, those who do seem to have horsemanship in their blood. Here, expert horseman Buyana races up a hill at one of our campsites.

Our horses enjoyed grazing freely by the tents every evening, as the riders ate dinner and got settled at the campsites for the night.

Jackson was interning with Stone Horse over the summer and showed us a few tricks, including how to throw a lasso.

We met a group of students who were practicing their archery skills just outside Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city.

a melting pot of humanity and ethnicities

But Mongolia changed the course of human history since long before the great Khan and his riders, the ultimate, self-sufficient soldiers. Apart from the Mongols, it is also the original homeland of the Huns and the Turks. It is a melting pot of humanity and ethnicities, where thousands of years ago two language families met and separated – the Indo-Europeans and the Altaics – and possibly where the wild horse was first tamed, thereby changing the course of history. When men on horses first raced out of Central Asia, first ancient Mesopotamia, then Egypt fell. Europe’s original ‘mother culture’ and India’s Harappan civilization disappeared. Humans, moving incredible distances on horses, spread across Asia, from the western end of Europe to Korea, all the way down to Arabia and India, creating nearly all the cultures we know today. Some of the languages they spoke evolved today into English, and others evolved into Japanese, but some of their words have become so intermingled that it’s hard to distinguish which came from which. Hindi is an Indo-European language, but today the common Hindi word for “home” is “ghar” (from the Sanskrit “grhá”) which is nearly identical to the Altaic Mongolian’s word for home, ger.

When the Hunnu (“Huns”) fought the Chinese Hans, the clans that lost fled towards Europe, creating Hungary, as well as leading to the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. Centuries later, the Turkics originally from the Mongolian steppes came hurtling into Constantinople, wiping out the Eastern Roman Empire.

We ride through rocky hills and rock formations, up and down defiles, over passes and across shallow streams, through meadows of flowers and knee-high grass. We ride all day, and every evening set up our traveling camp like the Mongols of old. We sleep in modern-day lightweight tents, under trees or under the stars, breathing cold clear air, drinking from fresh rain-fed streams, eating atop rocks while falcons circle above and the horses graze.

The Stone Horse team from left to right – Jackson, Keith, Buyana, Nyamaa and Sabine.

The world has continued to change, but horses and men will forever ride together.

One day we stretched out the ride to reach a farther campsite, a Hunnu gravesite. We set up our tents atop 2000-year old graves, low mounds of stones marking the places where men, women, children and horses were laid to rest. “I believe that these people would have loved us to be here, living like they did,” said Keith. When they hear our horses, they’ll feel alive”. The next morning, I pulled my horse off to a side and to a vantage point to shoot the group riding further down the valley. Jerry stomped and neighed angrily as the herd passed him by, but I held him back. When the group disappeared into the distance, I quickly packed my camera gear back into the saddlebags. Then jumping back on, I let the horse fly as he wished, back to his herd. Jerry, the funny but tough little horse, galloped madly a mile north over the gently rising slope. Our hooves rang out in the valley, as two large round mounds, Hun graves, emerged in front on the mountainside. Neither Jerry nor I needed to veer, and we galloped directly over the centre of the mounds, the sound of our hoofbeats gladdening passed Hunnu souls. Their ancestors, our ancestors, had once tamed wild horses, and together changed the world. The world has continued to change, but horses and men will forever ride together.